Reese Kaplan -- Baseball Card Cataloging -- a Mountainous Task

As a follow up to yesterday's article about baseball card collecting, I received quite a bit of input from friends and relatives when I introduced the topic to them.  Many did indeed confess to caring poorly for their childhood collections.  Several had vitriolic comments about their mothers' cleaning habits that made their baseball memories part of the landfill.  Others were aghast that I would regard such valuable commodities so haphazardly and shocked I didn't know to the penny what the current value of every single card was determined to be.  

As you can see, the closet emptying of cards alone (leaving the pennants, baseballs, gloves and autographs for another subsequent project) led to quite a mountain of cards to catalog in my newly created database.  I had scheduled next week to begin the data entry in earnest after a 45-card trial of my software yesterday.  Part of me says to find some kid interested in picking up some easy bucks doing the keyboarding and part of me says that without any income at the moment and no work schedule interrupting my leisure time, I have no excuse to pawn the many hours of work off on someone else.  

Baseball cards were the early introduction for many of us into the statistical side of the game.  Yes, they featured color photographs of our favorite players (and the hated opposition), but it was the flip side of the cards that contained short stories about the players themselves.  Early renditions contained their entire playing careers' statistics recited in print form.  Later versions often only included the previous year's numbers with a summary line for the career totals.  

Armed with a pocketful of my recent acquisitions, I can recall heated arguments with fellow baseball fan friends over who was the best pitcher, the best hitter, the best base stealer and who had the most home run power.  Obviously back in the late 60s and early 70s of my childhood we didn't have YouTube to consult for immediate video proof to use as evidence in our more emotional than factual thesis on what constituted the best of the best.  

I also recall vividly the jealousy that coursed through my veins when some amateur collector unearthed a hot rookie card or a superstar card that was missing from my own valued volume of baseball history.  How could he wind up with a Tom Seaver, a Donn Clendenon AND a Tug McGraw when I was saddled with players like Bobby Pfeil, Jerry Buchek and Don Hahn?

As I started getting a bit older (and theoretically more mature), like most kids the hobby somewhat fell to the back burner.  I discovered other hobbies to take up my time, and then there was the realization that perhaps my efforts and energies should be geared towards making girls a part of my life.  Baseball has a hard time keeping pace with a young man's discovery of the allure and curves of the other sex.

As stated yesterday, I did succeed in getting my mother to buy me some miscellaneous boxes of unsorted and unknown cards, but even that implicit pressure on her died out as I became a teenager.  Somehow it was no longer desirable nor acceptable to accompany my mother on her low cost shopping expeditions and my first earned wages from part time jobs was instead sequestered away in savings to fund the purchase of a car and to fund my upcoming college education.  

By the time I'd started working and earning a living, the baseball memorabilia business had blossomed into a profitable commodity exchange.  We all read articles about the Sotheby's or Christie's auction prices for an original Honus Wagner or Babe Ruth card.  We marveled at what they cost and how fortunate someone was to have uncovered these gems from the past.

As an adult I was kind of at best an occasional collector who would now and then dabble in cards as an investment commodity, but I never got particularly disciplined nor serious about it.  They simply went into storage with the rest of my childhood collection with the thought that "someday" I would get around to cataloging and valuing the individual cards.

Well, with my work of doing that facing me, I know I have quite a bit of typing and eyestrain ahead of me over the next several weeks.  It will be like organizing and estimating the value of my collection of paintings and sculptures.  The difference, of course, is that there were a mere 81 examples of the latter whereas the baseball cards appear to be in the thousands.  Again, I beg you all to wish me luck.